At the last debconf-team meeting [1]
It was #agreed that
Regarding the sponsorship of volunteers, bursaries will delegate
decisions to each of the teams (video, front desk, etc)
This message is an attempt to flesh out what the means, and give a
little background. Feel free to skip the background if the basic idea
seems plausible to you.
Background
----------
Every year a number of people are sponsored for food and accomodation
(and a smaller number for travel) at debconf primarily because their
role as debconf volunteers. Overall, this makes sense to me, since the
conference can't run without volunteers [2]. It seems to me [3] that
there are certain problems deciding these cases in the same pool (both
budgetary and ranking) as those sponsored on the basis of contributions
to Debian more generally.
1) It confuses the volunteers. Although the bursaries related questions
tend to confuse everyone [4], they tend to be especially confusing to
people whose main interaction with Debian is DebConf.
2) It annoys (some) volunteers. I'm not sure how much of this is
overlap with people generally feeling that using the same application
process for food and accomodation and travel sponsorship [5] is
unneccesarily heavyweight. Also, certain people really are no-brainers
to sponsor because they perform crucial on-site roles, and so it can
seem needlessly bureaucratic to have them go through the regular
bursaries process.
3) It confuses the bursaries team. There is typically much less of a
public record of the contributions to debconf than there is of a
packager, bug reporter, translator, and so on (Thanks Enrico!). I guess
that's because many of these contributions happen in the "real world",
that less adequately surveilled at this time. Even in the case where the
bursaries team has good information, it's still pretty hard to
competitively rank different kinds of contributors.
4) The bursaries team is put in a position of trying to balance the
needs of DebConf for volunteers, versus it's goals bringing contributors
together. This seems like a bad way to make a decisision, since it is
completely non-transparent, and unnecessarily so.
Proposal
--------
OK, enough complaining, what's the proposal?
a) As part of each year's budget process, allocate a budget amount to
each team for funding of volunteers. Presumably this amount would be
chosen in consultation with the relevent team leads, and people on
their teams.
b) In addition to the other questions, something like "I am applying for
support primarily as a Debconf volunteer on team X", where is a menu,
with ideally links to descriptions, a free form text field,
something like "past DebConf and related experience, anticipated
contribution to this DebConf"
c) Team leads then decide how to allocate their budget. Ideally this
should happen early enough so that if e.g. people don't get funded
this way, their application can still be considered in the general
pool.
d) The coordination team can deal with applications from team leads.
e) There is no step e, hopefully. But maybe I missed something?
David.
[1]: http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2015/debconf-team.2015-01-19-19.59.html
[2]: In any case, this message is about a procedural fine-tuning, rather
than radically changing the way the conference runs.
[3]: based on roughly 5 years of being involved
[4]: We're working on changing that. It's hard.
[5]: We think we know how to fix
this. http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2015/debconf-team.2015-01-08-20.01.html,
item 6.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature